Anatole France

Anatole France
(1844-1924)

Writer and ironic, skeptical, and urbane critic who was considered in
his day the ideal French man of letters. He was elected to the French
Academy in 1896 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921.
The son of a bookseller, he spent most of his life around books. At
school he received the foundations of a solid humanist culture and decided
to devote his life to literature. His first poems were influenced by
the Parnassian revival of classical tradition, and, though scarcely
original, they revealed a sensitive stylist who was already cynical
about human institutions.

This ideological skepticism appeared in his early stories: Le Crime
de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), a novel about a philologist in love with
his books and bewildered by everyday life; La Rotisserie de la Reine
Pedauque (1893; At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque), which discreetly
mocks belief in the occult; and Les Opinions de Jerome Coignard (1893),
in which an ironic and perspicacious critic examines the great institutions
of the state. His personal life underwent considerable turmoil. His
marriage in 1877 to Marie-Valerie Guerin de Sauville ended in divorce
in 1893. He had met Madame Arman de Caillavet in 1888, and their liaison
inspired his novels Thais (1890), a tale set in Egypt of a courtesan
who becomes a saint, and Le Lys rouge (1894; The Red Lily), a love story
set in Florence.

A marked change in France's work first appears in four volumes collected
under the title L'Histoire contemporaine (1897-1901). The first three
volumes--L'Orme du mail (1897; The Elm-Tree on the Mall), Le Mannequin
d'osier (1897; The Wicker Work Woman), and L'Anneau d'amethyste (1899;
The Amethyst Ring)--depict the intrigues of a provincial town. The last
volume, Monsieur Bergeret a Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris),
concerns the participation of the hero, who had formerly held himself
aloof from political strife, in the Alfred Dreyfus affair. This work
is the story of Anatole France himself, who was diverted from his role
of an armchair philosopher and detached observer of life by his commitment
to support Dreyfus. After 1900 he introduced his social preoccupations
into most of his stories. Crainquebille (1903), a comedy in three acts
adapted by France from an earlier short story, dramatizes the unjust
treatment of a small tradesman and proclaims the hostility toward the
bourgeois order that led France eventually to embrace socialism. Toward
the end of his life, his sympathies were drawn to communism. However,
Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The Gods are Athirst) and L'Ile des Pingouins
(1908; Penguin Island) show little belief in the ultimate arrival of
a fraternal society. World War I reinforced his profound pessimism and
led him to seek refuge from his times in childhood reminiscences. Le
Petit Pierre (1918; Little Pierre) and La Vie en fleur (1922; The Bloom
of Life) complete the cycle started in Le Livre de mon ami (1885; My
Friend's Book).

France has been faulted for the thinness of his plots and for his lack
of a vital creative imagination. His works are, however, considered
remarkable for their wide-ranging erudition, their wit and irony, their
passion for social justice, and their classical clarity, qualities that
mark France as an heir to the tradition of Denis Diderot and Voltaire.